DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data
(theatlantic.com)868 points by perihelions 3 days ago
868 points by perihelions 3 days ago
> U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID): The USAID Inspector General initiated a probe into Starlink satellite terminals provided to the Government of Ukraine
From a House Committee report matching Elon’s actions to agencies he has personal issues with:
https://democrats-judiciary.house.gov/uploadedfiles/2025.02....
Eliminating foreign aid seems to be a common cause of neo-conservative movements.
Boris Johnson shut down the British equivalent(Department for International Development) and scrapped the commitment to spend 0.7% of GDP on aid.
It's simplistic, drastic and brings no specific domestic effect which could be a rallying point for unrest.
It's also very easy to come up with rage bait stories of corruption and waste as justification, because in any organisation spending billions of dollars around the world you will always be to find something ridiculous that got funding, even though the proportion of the budget it represents is insignificant.
Lol you clearly have no idea what a 'neo-conservative' is or their history.
Neo-Conservatives were a branch of Democrat wark-hawks who wanted to police the world, that were upset about the pacifist attitude of the Democrats at the time - they emerged in the 60's and managed to largely take control of the Republican party moving forward, peaking under George W Bush.
Their founding principal was "Peace Through Strength" and have a strong belief in worldwide interventionism.
If you think the 'MAGA' / 'Trump' party is neo-conservative you literally just are ignoring the entire history, the power struggle (which Trump won) to retake the party from the Neo-Cons, and the fact that the trump admin is largely isolationist and opposed to being the world police.
Don't get me wrong there are still some neo-cons in office and with roles in his admin, but the republican infighting can be summarized as neocon vs MAGA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism https://www.britannica.com/topic/neoconservatism
Words mean things. The MAGE/America First party is focused on non-interventionism, advocate against regime change abroad, with a focus on America and it's interest rather than the endless wars.
You can debate the success or merit of that approach I guess, but the Neo-Cons are very happy to provide foreign aid as it is core to their ideology. They tend to do it via NED while the left uses USAID more (although both use both, but they each have lean in one direction).
Just for fun, I just tried this little experiment you can try to: " CoPilot: Can you rationally describe Trump as a neocon?
CoPilot: No, it would not be accurate to rationally state that Donald Trump is a neoconservative (neocon). Here are some key differences:
Foreign Policy: Neocons: Advocate for interventionist foreign policies, promoting democracy and regime change abroad. Trump: Emphasizes “America First” policies, focusing on non-interventionism, reducing military engagements abroad, and prioritizing domestic issues.
Military Engagement: Neocons: Support maintaining strong international alliances and a significant military presence globally.
Trump: Criticized NATO, praised authoritarian leaders like Vladimir Putin, and negotiated troop withdrawals from conflict zones like Afghanistan.
Economic Policies: Neocons: Generally support free trade and globalization.
Trump: Advocates for economic nationalism, including tariffs and renegotiating trade deals to favor American interests.
These differences highlight that Trump’s policies and ideology do not align with neoconservative principles. If you have any more questions or need further details, feel free to ask! "
USAID was funding the StarLink deployment in Ukraine and was reexamining the deal[1], likely to try to negotiate a cheaper plan or to reduce the funding. My opinion is that it likely hit his ego a bit and it was a really sweet deal for StarLink, so losing out on it would suck.
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/usaid-elon-musk-starlink-probe-ukra...
It had little to do with the contract size. Starlink was being investigated to determine how the Russians were getting/using them.
https://www.newsweek.com/usaid-elon-musk-starlink-probe-ukra...
This raises a potential conflict of interest, as Musk's company was under investigation by USAID shortly before he began calling for the shutdown. Starlink's activity in Eastern Europe has been criticized, with many Russian operatives claiming to have access to Starlink despite Musk's assurances that only Ukraine was using the service.
Additionally, in September last year, Ukrainian forces downed a Russian drone that had a Starlink terminal integrated with its systems, raising questions as to how secure Starlink's operations during the Ukraine war are.
Calling a guy a pedophile repeatedly because you made yourself look stupid getting excited about your cool submarine and how awesome everyone will think you are when you save some kids wasn't really worth much money either. I don't think Musk has the self-control to think like that, honestly.
Unlikely. No one really cares about temporary low-value ad-hoc arrangements like the one between Starlink and USAID. It's too small to matter.
The FAA and EPA have been much much bigger headaches for Musk.
USAID was just a juicy target, since it was essentially a slush fund.
By the look of it, they were investigating how Ukraine use of Starlink provided to them. You make a great journalist. lol.
Thanks. Admittedly "Probably something to do with Starlink" would've been more accurate.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250101100055/https://www.usaid...
That's now removed from the live website.
Point being, it's a little strange USAID was immediately targeted for destruction with extreme prejudice by the same man providing the terminals.
Especially given their contentious history:
An easy win with his rabid xenophobic fan base? A soft target to hurt his opponents and distract from other terrible things they're doing?
They'll work their way up to anti-constitutional attacks on everything else if they get a chance, USAID is their starting point because it's a softer target in a few ways:
1. The people who'll suffer or die from their mal-management will generally be faraway foreigners, as opposed to people voters know.
2. More of the victims have a much more difficult time launching any kind of lawsuit in US courts.
3. It has a small veneer of Presidential-involvement-ness due to its proximity to diplomacy and foreign relations.
4. Like tariffs, being able to withhold aid allows Trump to commit extortion against other countries, much like how he was impeached for extorting Ukraine in his first term.
Ironically USAID might help Americans more than foreign folks, and disproportionately Trump’s own supporters - if the money is being spent to buy American products, particularly food, that is then shipped overseas.
Scenario: You give someone $40B to feed people, and $1B actually feeds them while $39B vanishes into overhead and ideological reprogramming. Then they tell you they need more. If this is success, what does failure look like?
> overhead and ideological reprogramming
I despair at the thought process that crams these two things together.
2.5% overhead would be really good. Most charities don’t come close.
“Ideological reprogramming,” whatever that actually means, would be completely different.
It looks like USAID had 4B of the 40B budget actually reach endpoint users, which would make the overhead closer to 90% [1], not 97.5% like I originally estimated.
[1] https://chatgpt.com/share/67b7a0c4-bf48-8011-9997-41b350dd0b...
I have my own experience. As a non-American, I know a lot of hungry people. And I have never heard of any help for them from USAID. And who do you think received help from USAID out of all those I have encountered and ever heard about? Only left-leaning democrat's shield "independent" journalists, whose job mostly consist of ideological reprogramming and who now scream all over twitter how Trump destroys their lives. ONLY.
So yes, I don't have any numbers, but I'm used to trusting my own eyes. And what I see (on this particular issue) is way more consistent with what Musk says than with what his opponents say.
Less than 10% went to the needy. Most of the rest was either wasteful, political or a chain of NGOs performing kickbacks.
They were funding censorship campaigns on American citizens etc
The only thing "libertarian" about Musk is his extreme interest in his own freedom - everyone else's be damned.
My understanding is USAID was one of those organizations thet refused to pause spending when Trump lawfully asked all agencies to stop spending (it was a 90 day hold, not a outright denial, only congress can do that). Agencies that should adhere to trumps orders went to the top.
what's with people not having beef with USAID? It's done so many crazy and bad things, for example:
USAID funded the hepatitis vaccination drive that the CIA used as a cover for espionage against the bin laden family, leading to polio outbreak in pakistan.
https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/he-led-cia-bin-laden-and-...
Distaste for USAID in any other time would be bipartisan; the Clinton Administration floated shuttering it too. If you go to DC a lot of insiders will say, 'yeah, USAID's got to go'.
don't fool yourself. USAID had the power to stop this.
I didn't bring this up because it would be controversial on this website. I think USAID is a tool for advancing US geopolitical interests aims first and foremost and I would like it to be abolished as well. But someone like Musk wanting it to be shuttered doesn't make sense because these organisation in one way or another advance the interests of US businesses and he would benefit from that as well.
I think USAID could certainly be classified as “soft power.” I think throwing it all out makes little sense in light of the provably good things it did.
I think that any sufficiently big organization has done bad things, this alone shouldn't be enough to close an agency.
However, I'm sure Cia has done, does, and will do much worse things than usaid
Vaccination campaigns are “crazy and bad” because they might be hijacked by the CIA?
I think you’ve identified the wrong culprit there buddy.
not might. Were. A USAID that isn't problematic would have stopped it. It failed to; just one symptom of the problems at USAID.
USAID is a bogeyman agency in far-right conspiracy circles.
Musk gets his world view from far-right conspiracists.
Funny thing is that kind of government foreign aid is the kind of soft-power over smaller countries thing that right-wingers politicians love, or at least used to. Similar to the BS that China pulls with the belt and road initiative (but probably not as bad in most instances).
Basically give/loan money, get international political support back. Use political support to bully international institutions (UN, WTO, WHO, etc) to do what you want.
I guess soft-power is not enough anymore, they want all the power.
Marco Rubio has been very vocal on his support for USAID for years if you want to see what the traditional right wing take on this has been. "Critical to our security" etc. And he is of course in charge of the smoking remains of it now.
It's more likely it came from Trump instead of Elon. Trump is an isolationist and has long complained about money being spent abroad rather than at home.
> I'm worried that one of Musk friends might be a Chinese or Russian spy.
Given Musk's ties to China and his overt friendship with Putin, I don't think there's a need for one of his friends to be a spy when he's right there with a glowing neon finger over his head.
“Now at least I get to watch horrible people get a dose of their own medicine”
Doge is not being this careful, in fact I’d argue that Doge will disproportionately impact people not on your target list.
All the “horrible” people you don’t like are going to be “punished” with lucrative contracts in the private sector while line workers, most of whom may agree with you suffer
Could you please stop posting flamewar and ideological battle comments? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Also: please don't use 'edit' to do deletions that deprive replies of context. That's unfair to readers.
Could you please stop posting flamewar and ideological battle comments? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Yeah, they really aren't happy the corruption is being unearthed, this is above and beyond anything they were planning.
Hell, there should have been massive riots by the left now, though the funding has now disappeared for the professional organisers and rent a crowd.
Democrats are 20 mil in debt from the election, and now their money funnels have been closed down. They simply weren't expecting this.
call me Naive and paint me a fool, but I do think this is going to go down as Musk's lifetime achievement. Think about it, he has money, he has arguably built great companies, and now, for his masterpiece, he can, and I honestly believe he will.....CURE DEMOCRACY. I want him to succeed, because the next logical giant is CAPITALISM, and that one, in the collective interest of humanity, and planetary survival, needs FIXING!! Almost every system created by man, eventually turns corrupt, because for some reason we interfere, we want to tip the balance, instead of give free will and life to the things we create. The ecology of a system should be self-regulating, that's how NATURE operates.
cure democracy? they just broke it. did you vote for musk? did anyone? are you thinking right? A fascist dictator just ruined america for good and this can't be fixed. Just the reputation of america alone is ruined for generations to come, and I bet you are not even thinking of what "reputation" means, it isn't "like me please" type of a reputation but "let's avoid wars and trade with each other" reputation. I honestly think people like you deserve the america these evil people are creating, too bad the rest of us are stuck with you. You just lost our country and you have no idea what a precious and wonderful thing we've lost. You put your trust in a greedy evil billionaire, foolishness for the history books.
It doesn't sound like you are in an emotional state to have this discussion, which is ok, but the findings are undeniable. I don't see anyone arguing, "they're making up the fraud". So from an objective point of view, an audit of this magnitude has been dreamt of by both parties for decades, heck probably going back a century. No one has been able to do it, lacking either collective will, or, more famously, bureaucratic pushback. My argument is, and you can ask any senior or experienced executive this(tho I think it's actually an accounting principle), anyways...when a top level professional arrives at a new job/department/unit/etc, the first order of business is "finding your salary", this is essentially your brain finding your salary among the waste or leaks in the space you were asked to manage. This is what DOGE is tasked with, no matter the cost, stopping the waste will pay for the cost, even if it cost trillions(which I highly doubt), you can amortize that and still get USA's bottom line in the black.
There are a litany of articles taking about the exact lying you say they are not doing:
https://www.businessinsider.com/doge-savings-estimate-websit...
https://www.axios.com/2025/02/19/doge-musk-audit-mistake-sav...
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/doge-wall-of-receipts-shows...
So yeah they are lying; whether intentionally or unintentionally. At this point I’m not sure what is worse.
I agree. It's nice to hear someone grounded discuss it.
A lot of people (particularly on Reddit) have been driven insane by psyops, they can't critically think outside what they are told to think anymore. It's amazing to watch, and also quite sad/scary
I tell you man, this DOGE animal is going to make politicians run scared all over the world. This is the best thing since Science won the climate change fake debate. DOGE is actually draining the swamp, you know how many politicians have promised and even ran full campaigns on reform, or financial austerity, or fighting corruption/big spending/etc. Mark my words, other countries are going to start formulating their own version of DOGE. This is like the upstart BUKELE and his curving of gang violence in record timing (3 years). There are so many nations trying to replicate that because Citizens are asking for their own BUKELE at home.
The man engaged in massive human rights abuses…
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/06/el-salvador-p...
This should be very illegal. It’s a huge security risk to let Federal government employees access Federal government systems.
I didn’t. It’s just a giant security scam to let doge access systems. Didn’t you read the article? The USAID people said they don’t trust the doge people so we shouldn’t either.
Is this more access than 19-year-old summer interns in the various agencies get (to their given agency)?
Because it's not a foregone conclusion that it is.
At least not based on "according to an employee in senior leadership at USAID".
The comments here seem mostly against DOGE, but I have seen the waste in these organizations firsthand, and we all pay for it. Musk hopes to cut spending by 10%, but that is only because he is limited in what he can do. A Twitter-style cleanup would at least reduce it by 50%, but it is not feasible. Know that those 10% or 50% directly map to a percentage of your income and lifestyle directly (higher taxes) or indirectly (higher inflation).
I worked for years helping procure government grants and saw how it was used. People who have lived in just one place (aka. California) and have nothing to compare don't realize the amount of waste happening here. The cities that collect the highest taxes have the infrastructure and facilities of a poor town. The prop monies go down the drain or are grossly misspent all the time. DOGE is necessary and needs this level of access and authority to make this scale of change in such a short time.
Nationalistic flamewar isn't ok here, regardless of which nation you have a problem with or how right you are or you feel you are.
Please don't post flamewar comments to HN generally. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
(Fortunately your earlier comment history seems fine, so this should be easy to fix.)
> You Americans voted for this
A thin majority in an election with a poor (and/or constrained) turnout in a lop-sided nonsense of an electoral system with disproportionate weightings voted for parts of this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_United_States...
The 2024 election had historically high turnout. The 2nd highest turnout since 1968, the 7th highest since 1932.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_United_States...
Trump won 77,284,118 votes, or 49.8 percent of the votes cast for president.
Voter turnout nationally in 2024 was 63.9 percent (below the 66.6 percent voter turnout recorded in 2020).
So 31.8 percent of the eligible voters in the USofA voted for Trump in the 2024 elections, most eligible voters didn't vote for Trump.
Eligible Voters aside, an even greater percentage of people in the USofA didn't vote for Trump being too young or otherwise disenfranchised.
Of those that did vote for Trump it's a leap to say that all of them voted to fire the chief government records keeper, to empower DOGE to gut departments, etc; like Brexit, many of those who voted for it had no real idea what they had voted for.
In the campaign Trump ran to avoid jail he repeatedly stated he wasn't aware of the Project 2025 playbook, that he would be all things to all people. People who voted for Trump voted for what they heard, what they thought he promised.
Most of the citizens in the USofA did not vote Trump, not all of those voted to gut the government, the sciences, foreign aid, etc.
Not quite a majority, but a narrow plurality:
49.8% Trump, 48.3% Harris
Though you could include the .49% that voted for RFK (you'd maybe need to decide which side to add Jill Stein Green and Libertarian candidate too).
Even completely ignoring the dubious ethics invoked - a lot of non Americans will get worse outcomes than the US because of this. Given the work that has been cancelled so far, some of those non Americans are likely already dead.
That’s a bold statement. US is a young country. Empires that lasted longer by 5x have been consigned to the dust bin of history with nary but an oral tradition to remember them. If looking at americas military capability is any indication it is already in steep decline especially with regards to its seeming inability to not crash or destroy million/billon dollar hardware purely based on incompetence and short staffing. Its inability to prosecute an illegal war in the ME (occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan) is also a great example of the lack of exceptionalism exhibited by americas armed forces and their inept leadership.
Reference please! To my knowledge DOGE has not uncovered any obvious cases of financial fraud. Every example of their cost-cutting that I've looked at (and I've dug!) has been lawfully congressionally appropriated funds being spent according to guidelines from the previous administration making reasonable interpretations of the congressionally passed budget. The new administration forbids spending on initiatives related to increasing diversity, equity, or inclusiveness or decreasing climate change, as well as disapproves of most kinds of foreign aid. None of this is fraud.
They claimed to discover .. yes, but they're essentially too young, dumb, and inexperienced to understand the oddities in the data .. the 100+ year old peole are a result of COBOL NULL entries for people with no birth record dates (which is a real thing in 300+ million people), etc.
Also:
DOGE Claimed It Saved $8 Billion in One Contract. It Was Actually $8 Million
The biggest single line item on the website of Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team appears to include an error.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/18/upshot/doge-contracts-mus...
DOGE is not a trustworthy reporter, they are incentivised to make big, bold, bullshit claims.
You're brainwashed. They're robbing you of essential services and you're still going "yeah, go on!!".
Notice how they only go after things the common man might benefit from? Surprisingly DOGE uncovers no waste whatsoever in the many billion dollars military contracts.
What do you think will happen to your country when the ban on medicaid takes effect? Will the millions that rely on it simply die? Do you even care or are you totally void of empathy?
It's not the government's job to take money from Paul to give to Peter. I fundamentally object to this. I take the view of Austrian economics. IMO, all the corporate monopolies we have today are caused by excessive government money printing, weaponizing the people's money against the people. How about having empathy for the worker, the value creator, who has been robbed of money and, worse, opportunities as a result of government-backed corporate monopolies and regulatory moats?
You can't imagine how bad things have been for some of us.
You are gravely mistaken. How is the extensive union-busting, deregulation, wage theft and general disregard for worker protections going to help you?
Musk and Trump's class interests are diametrically opposed to ours, the real value-creating workers. They want you to work more for less pay. Watch you and your loved ones' situations dégrade over the next few years, and reconsider your position.
Not gonna lie, sitting here in a collapsing and feckless Europe, I'm supper jelly.
This is great news for anyone paying taxes in the US. People really underestimate how incompetent the federal work force really is. Not everyone of course. But I contracted with the DOD for six years and you legit could have fired half the federal employees. They didnt do shit all day and it sounds like it's gotten way worse since COVID allowed these people to work from home.
I seriously want a real, non-politically based argument on why we shouldnt be trying to 1. find fraud 2. fire 10-20% of these people immediately
Imagine what we can do in 2025 by applying LLM search to all of the federal paperwork!
The moment they had physical access to the system, it was necessary to assume this. It's called an 'evil maid' attack, and of all communities this one should have been blowing the whistle. Loudly, repeatedly, and in open defiance of people who argue that this is a storm in a teacup, a non issue, just another MOT, etc.
Especially when you look at the background of the Doge team - 'ex' hackers, 'security specialists', full-on racists...
Perhaps surprisingly, the CEO of YC and Paul Graham have been publicly supportive of the DOGE team, despite all the racism and existential threat. I don't know if that's from fear, or greed, but there are strong arguments for both.
Some of the stories about this topic which have been flagged here can be seen in my favorites. I'd be interested in collecting more examples, if you know of any missing.
> In the coming weeks, the team is expected to enter IT systems at the CDC and Federal Aviation Administration, and it already has done so at NASA, according to sources we’ve spoken with at each of those agencies. At least one DOGE ally appears to be working to open back doors into systems used throughout the federal government.
If discussing this openly and often this isn't possible due to very simple flag abuse, then what is this community actually even worth.
> Perhaps surprisingly, the CEO of YC and Paul Graham have been publicly supportive of the DOGE team, despite all the racism and existential threat. I don't know if that's from fear, or greed, but there are strong arguments for both.
> …
> If discussing this openly and often this isn't possible due to very simple flag abuse, then what is this community actually even worth.
Just want to add to this topic that HN advertises YC AI Startup school: https://events.ycombinator.com/ai-sus - where Musk is listed as a first speaker.
Though it doesn’t surprise me - YC is in the same circle of radical technocrats (a16z, Altman, Musk, etc.) and hosted Balaji talking about dystopian plans about techno-authoritarian city states 10 or 15 years ago.
Paul graham has his head so far up his on ass it's unreal.
Listening to him talk about Elon taking over Twitter and that leading to more free speech was embarrassing. Like, actual adults believe this shit.
I just checked his blog. Latest post “The Origins of Wokeness”.
Protesting against police brutality of suffocating apprehended person is apparently “peak woke”.
Musk apparently “succeded in neutralizing” twitter - “without censoring either” (left or right). He argues in the notes that Musk prioritized paid users and paid users are more right wing and hence left wing users self censored themselves, but left “could tilt it back if they wanted to”.
EDIT: also again proving my original comment - PG is thanking Sam Altman for proof reading the post…
Christ they are truly dumb people who just got good with computers.
It’s not surprising the CEO of YC supports this, he also supports the idea of the network state. This community is now primarily exists to launder Curtis Yarvins galaxy brain ideas.
The most surprising thing about the fascist takeover is that it’s so incredibly stupid.
I didn’t get something until it was pointed out very recently.
The issue isn’t what we think. The issue is what we think OTHERS think.
This is what social media truly fucks up. We can’t see the people nodding in disagreement. We can only see their silence, and we must respond to the person who IS talking and holding our attention.
Practically - I care about privacy, and I expect that damn near most people here care about it.
People can have their “well actually” arguments, but when push comes to shove, techies on HN should vocalize their annoyance with the way this is being done. Even if you support their politics, this ISNT how you execute secure projects.
Wrong from the start. The Emperor isn’t wearing any clothes territory. We dont have to agree on other things.
Please, someone, give me somewhere else to go other than here.
> Can someone explain to me where the issue lies?
I'm starting to wonder if HN has also been taken over by bots and astroturfers.
Audits require transparency and people who know wtf they are doing. Musk and his team have shown none of either. They have repeatedly talked about what they think they found that was later shown to be false. Instead of correcting course they double down (see the recent story of 8B vs 8M or Musk saying 10s of millions of dead people getting social security, there are many more that come out daily). They have also fought against efforts to increase transparency into what they are doing through a number of ways, either taking down datasets that could be cross checked or moving DOGE under the records act to avoid FOIA until 2032.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/18/upshot/doge-contracts-mus...
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/musk-misreads-social-securit...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/10/us/politics/trump-musk-do...
They’re trolling and what they want to do is poison the conversation we’re all having. Elon Musk is a troll too, why do you think they’d be any different? These people don’t read books (aside from a few scriptures they follow), they read memes instead. This is horrifying and but could also be their undoing.
The issue lies in a number of areas:
1. Politicians are watching their favorite pork barreling disappear day by day
2. Since Trump was elected President the waste identified is going to be what Trump thinks is waste
3. The job of the Democrats is to get elected, and you don’t get elected by sitting by as your opponent keeps doing things many voters are supporting, you try and stop it
Because government waste is high on the list of priorities of many voters and DOGE seems to have only improved Trump’s approval rating, the Democrats can’t come out and say “stop cutting government waste”!
So instead they try to politically attack DOGE by saying many of them are young (so are the soldiers we send overseas to fight wars), they are unelected (so are all government workers), they aren’t allowed to do this (to be determined by courts) and they are cutting the wrong things (the voters will decide this in the end).
So if you like what DOGE is doing, sit back and buckle up because it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
I can understand feeling wary because someone may be watching your work, but conceivably this was always the case? I know it’s uncomfortable having this agency with no oversight gaining access to systems within the government, but it’s got to be huge right? I’m sure Elon’s tapped some smart fellas to be bulls in this china shop, but there’s no way they can put an eye on every single piece of information that flies through all of the systems of the federal government. You’d need a huge staff, tools to be built, never mind trying to solidify all those interfaces.
It seems more likely that they’ll gain access to all these systems, be completely overwhelmed about what to do, and then do small things that wouldn’t actually have an impact but would gain headlines, and then call it a day.
What's Elon's beef with USAID? I would think he would go after something like food stamps first owing to his libertarian ethos. Maybe he sees USAID as a completely benevolent handout and a waste of money? I cannot begin to understand why.